The Ascension of the Lord

Viri Galilæi, quid admiramini aspicientes in cælum?

Forty days (and more) have passed since Easter. This year, I was was fortunate enough to celebrate the Ascension twice. The first was Ascension Thursday at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes, Spokane, as part of the 2019 Sacred Liturgy Conference. It was a Pontifical High Mass of the Ascension of our Lord in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, celebrated by Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco.

Of course, in many places in the United States including my Archdiocese of Seattle, today is the Solemnity of the Ascension. Yesterday my parish of Holy Rosary, together with our sister parish of Visitation, celebrated the Vigil in the Ordinary Form at Visitation Church with Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle.

The occasion was the Confirmation of 27 youth and adults of our two parishes. It is, I believe, the last “joint Mass” celebrated by these two parishes, and the last time that Holy Rosary Parish will celebrate Mass in this building.

Although we were limited to a minimal number of servers, complicated by the fact that several altar server families had siblings being Confirmed, we made it work. The Archbishop’s MC, Deacon Carl Chilo, was gracious and very good at his job. Archbishop Sartain, of course, is simply amazing. Warm and fatherly, with an easy laugh.

I mentioned to him that the first time I had MC’d was with him, and I showed him the photo from the event. He was delighted. We took a photo together later, and he asked I send him copies of both, as a “before and, well, let’s not say ‘after’ but ‘later'”.

I don’t have a copy of yesterday’s photo yet, but it’s got to be better than the one from 2011. We’re both staring into the sun. I’m squinting, and he’s using his bishop super-powers and being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

In addition to serving at yesterday’s Mass, I was also honoured to be the Confirmation sponsor of an intelligent, charming young lady, a daughter of friends and a former (and sometimes still) altar server. After the Mass, I told her that now that she had the fullness of the Holy Spirit, her job was to go out and change the world for the better. Be holy. No pressure.

But what about today’s solemnity? What is the Ascension?

It is that moment when Christ ascended into heaven, and it’s one of the great comic scenes in the Bible:

As they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight.

While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”

(Acts 1:9-11)

Can you just imagine the Apostles standing and staring into the sky? And the angels bringing them back to earth? Or is it just me?

One of the more succinct descriptions of this day I’ve found has been copied all over the Internet, to the point where I’m unable to properly source it:

The Ascension of Our Lord, which occurred 40 days after Jesus Christ rose from the dead on Easter, is the final act of our redemption that Christ began on Good Friday. On this day, the risen Christ, in the sight of His apostles, ascended bodily into Heaven (Luke 24:51; Mark 16:19; Acts 1:9-11).

Christ’s bodily Ascension foreshadows our own entrance into Heaven not simply as souls, after our death, but as glorified bodies, after the resurrection of the dead at the Final Judgment. In redeeming mankind, Christ not only offered salvation to our souls but began the restoration of the material world itself to the glory that God intended before Adam’s fall.

What does it mean, to “ascend”?

We say that Christ has “ascended to the Father”, but what exactly does that mean if Jesus is God, the second person of the Holy Trinity? Are we talking about some sort of movement of the soul or spirit? Or is this something else?

We can see the physical manifestation of the Ascension in the reading from Acts, above, where Christ in His resurrected body was taken up into the clouds. This argues against a purely spiritual meaning. It is, in fact, the culmination of the Incarnation itself.

Think about it – God condescended to descend to us. He who is the Son of God became also the son of Mary, true God and true man.

“…was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became Man…”

Even in His resurrection, Christ did not shed His human body but appeared to Apostles in a form so palpable, so substantial, that Thomas could put his hands into the wounds of the Crucifixion.

In this context it makes perfect sense that He would take His body with Him, as it were, on His final Ascension. It wasn’t just His body, it was Him, as we are individuals composed of body and soul, so Christ is composed of human body, human nature, and Divine spirit, Divine nature.

Or, put another way, body, blood, soul, and divinity.

The Ascension is also the explicit prefiguring of our own bodily ascension at Christ’s second coming, which is further demonstrated by one who was taken early: the Blessed Virgin Mary in her Assumption.

In its ascension, our human race did not stop at any other height until this same nature was received at the seat of the eternal Father. Our human nature, united with the divinity of the Son, was on the throne of His glory.

The ascension of Christ is not elevation. Hope for the body is also invited where the glory of the Head preceded us. … Today we not only are established as possessors of paradise, but we have even penetrated the heights of the heavens in Christ. The indescribable grace of Christ, which we lost through the ill will of the devil, prepared us more fully for that glory.

Incorporated within Himself, the Son of God placed those whom the violent enemy threw down from the happiness of our first dwelling at the right hand of the Father.

(Pope Saint Leo the Great)

Christ has ascended not only in his Divinity, but also in His Humanity, the “first fruits” of our fallen race restored to our place with Christ at God’s right hand.

In more concrete terms, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says,

The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.”

“For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”

“The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in His divinity, assumed our nature, so that He, made man, might make men gods.”

(Catechism of the Catholic Church, 460)

In some sense, perhaps Christ’s Resurrection and the Ascension map to our own Particular Judgement at the end of our life, and the Last Judgment at Christ’s Second Coming.

Our Particular Judgment is very personal, just me alone with Christ, much as Christ Himself rose from the dead unseen at Easter. The Last Judgment, on the other hand, will be public, with the immense company of all those living at the time together with the dead in their glorified bodies, all gathered as were the Apostles at Christ’s Ascension.

It’s something to meditate on, perhaps while listening to Palestrina’s majestic motet on the Ascension, Viri Galilæi.

Edited to add:

Thanks to Melanie Wolf for the lower photo!